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The best of Sicily

For our insider's guide to the Italian island, Horatio Clare provides eight great reasons to visit, from the perfect beach to a spectacular helicopter flight over fiery Mount Etna.

PROPERLY HOT: The perfect beach There is no sand on the best beach in Sicily. It is a strand of tiny pebbles, shining black, pink and grey at the sea's edge, and bigger stones, hot and smooth as eggs below the cliffs. Above rises thick greenery, bright with flowers; the air smells of rosemary, lavender, sage and thyme. The cliffs climb up to crests and peaks. There are eagles up there, peregrines and mouflon, long-horned wild sheep which move in flying leaps through the rocks and flowers.

There is no road, no hotel, though people still come, especially in the summer. The water is properly cold in May; you gasp with pleasure and your fingers tingle. The sun is always properly hot. The water is so clear you can see the changing seabed all the way along the path from the tiny port where you arrived. The seaways here are full of wrecks: Punic, Roman, Greek.

This wild place was once famous for pirates; everyone else stayed away. Say what you like about pirates (quietly! They are still here, their descendants sit under umbrellas on the quay, repairing fishing nets) but they know a perfect island when they see one. And a perfect beach.

On an early summer morning you will have it all to yourself. The piers of rock on either side make it feel exclusive. You sit on the hot stones with your feet in the water and think of Odysseus: Samuel Butler and Robert Graves believed this was Ithaca, his island home. And you know, as you dream, that you have slipped through a hole in the world, through a gap in the net of time. You are on a little mountain in the sea, one of the Isles of the Blessed. You are on Marettimo.

Marettimo is reached by hydrofoil (80 mins) from Trapani with Ustica Lines (00 39 09 23 873 813; www.usticalines.it), from 11. Bear left from the port and follow the track

From Palermo, rent a car and head west, and back in time. Western Sicily is a dreamy landscape of hot hills, glittering seas, sweetly sloping valleys (full of flowers in the spring), and mountain towns raising their roofs to the skies. This is where the sacred places and the temples of the ancient world still survive, the best of them at Segesta, 90 minutes' drive away.

We stand in the ruins of the town of Segesta, the Greek theatre at our feet, looking across the valley to the temple. It is a perfect little thing, never finished (the columns are not fluted) and never destroyed. Her finger moving across the view, first near then far, my guide and instructor, Elena, tells stories of Segesta and Erice, the town on the mountain above Trapani, famous throughout the ancient Mediterranean as the home of the goddess the Phoenicians called Ashtarte, and the Greeks Aphrodite. Elena teaches through a combination of myth and archaeology. Half Russian, with a Russian love of erudition and an immigrant's enthusiasm for Sicily, she is a superb guide to the many histories of the West.

It is a gripping classical education slotted into an afternoon: here wars were fought between Elymians, who said their ancestors were refugees from the fall of Troy, and Greeks, who claimed they were descendants of Hercules. (In Greek legend one of Hercules's labours brought him to Erice, where he overthrew its lord, Eryx. Hercules had to press on, but he allowed Eryx to live, on condition that his descendants would surrender to those of Hercules when they arrived. 'And here we are!' said the Greeks. The response of the Elymians can easily be imagined.)

On the horizon stood the temple of Erice: be lying with one of the priestesses, sailors believed they were in union with Aphrodite herself, who they hoped would send a shaft of love to pacify Zeus, the storm god. Thousands of years later this connection survives in the Madonna of Trapani, who is the goddess of sailors and recognised as such by the Vatican. Elena tells of how the little temple of Segesta was built just after, and probably by the same architects responsible for the Parthenon of Athens: it curves in the same ways, so from a distance its lines appear straight. The tour contains delightful asides: passing a carob tree, Elena explains the measurement of gold and precious stones: the Arabs used carob seeds as standard weights; carobs became carats.

We drive south to Selinunte for older history, bigger temples, and lunch. Just to the west of the little town of Marinella which abuts the archaeological park is a beach: drive down to the seafront, bear left and keep going. The beach is a long bronze crescent, and there is a single large café on the sand. There is an extensive, uncomplicated menu, and many happy looking Sicilians: both excellent signs.

When Elena brought London restaurateur and chef Antonio Carluccio here, he went into a huddle with the owner. When your food arrives you will see why. It is an old mantra: the freshest ingredients, cooked in unfussy, traditional ways, but Santa Maria! The results! If you could make spaghetti con vongole like this then you would serve nothing else. After a morning at the temples, a long, long lunch here, a snooze and a swim would make a perfect day. As it is, Elena has a coffee while I run into the sea. And then we are both ready to visit 650BC: the Greek city of Selinunte.

It stands in its own park, town on one ridge, temples on the other, with a river valley running between them, down to the shore. There is no sight or sound of modern time, there is only the stirring of grass, the flicker of lizards and the cling-clonk of sheep bells. We walk the streets and alleys of a ruined city, a world conceived and inhabited as a work of living art, harmonious with its landscape, its Gods and its situation, overlooking what Pirandello called 'the African sea'. The harbour is now a reed bed, and the temples fell to earthquakes, but it is easy to imagine what a pleasure it would have been to live and worship here, and what a nightmare it surely was when all was sacked and stolen, when the Carthaginians came. 'If the Selinuntines cannot defend their liberty, they deserve to become slaves,' said the victor, Hamilcar, sounding slightly guilty. He slaughtered and enslaved them, and gave their town to his people.

Temple E, the magnificent temple to Hera, is one of my favourite places on the island. It has been resurrected, and stands open once more to the sky. Elena explains how it would have been used: aligned to the rising sun, with a treasury at the far end where offerings were kept, and Hera on an altar, presiding over all. Under the quiet skies, amid the lemon-grey stones, in the spaces between the great pillars, you can feel the presence of something peaceful and beautiful, and not quite earthly, but definitely still here.

'What is civilisation?' asked the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, rhetorically. 'Civilisation is a city by the sea.' This is the apogee of civilisation, then, this Manhattan of the ancient world, this gentle synthesis of water and stone and sunlight. 'Never a day without sun,' said Aeschylus, of his favourite city. It seems appropriate that her most famous son is Archimedes, who said he could move the world, if you gave him an appropriate lever, pivot and place to stand. With the help of his engines, Syracuse almost repelled the Romans when they came for her: she had already shattered the power of Athens when that mighty city launched an unprovoked attack.

The Syracusans trapped the Athenian armada in the great harbour, destroyed it, and imprisoned its fighting men in the quarries, where they died in thousands, excepting those who could recite verses of Aeschylus, who were released. Poetry, myth and engineering are the constituents of the lovely, quiet drama that is Syracuse. When visitors say 'Syracuse' today they are thinking of Ortygia, the little island, now bridged to the mainland, which guards and almost closes the mouth of the great harbour. Here you will find the spring of Arethusa, where fresh water surfaces in the salt sea. Here is the cathedral, one of the great wonders of southern Europe (Sicily hoards several of them) where a Greek temple became a Roman temple which became a mosque which became a Norman cathedral.

Outside is one of the loveliest piazzas in Italy, more a long triangle than a square, where a bowed slope of paving, baroque palaces, the levant wind, the cathedral front and Syracuse's heavenly sun combine to make perhaps the most perfect coffee-drinking spot in the world. Narrow alleys criss-cross the little island, from quayside to seawall. In the summer, platforms of scaffolding and planks are erected on the seaward side where young and old swim and sunbathe. They are a mixture: locals, students and visitors; but Ortygia has that trick, like firelight or wonderful food, which makes all men and women feel at home. You feel a long way from the rest of Europe in Syracuse, but simultaneously, strangely, as if you have found its soul.

It is the singing that strikes you first. The villa is surrounded by a yellow-green sea of lemon groves which are not subjected to sprays or pesticides, so the low lush lines of trees are thronged with birds. The house sits in the middle of the orchards like a ship at anchor. It gazes towards the blue Ionian, and is itself watched over by Etna. It is difficult, as you stand in the garden, to know which way to look. There is an embarrassment of beauty at the villa L'Olmo. It is exquisitely peaceful, except for the birds and the occasional laughter of your hostess, Marina di San Giuliano. You wonder if there is Egyptian or Greek in her dark eyes: there is something of a gypsy Cleopatra in the rattle of her bracelets and her impeccable standards. Her husband Andrea, who comes from an old Catania family, has the smiling ease and gravel voice of a mature Marcello Mastroianni.

All the couple's guests say the same thing. 'It seems nothing is more important to them than your happiness,' says Vince, an American of Sicilian ancestry who has brought his family here every year since L'Olmo opened to guests in 2002. 'It's like having your own five-star hotel,' muses Huw Beaugi_, a sunburned Englishman. With his Sicilian wife, Rossella, Huw runs ThinkSicily, an agency for those who want to see the island in comfort and style. A former engineer, Huw met Rossella, a biologist, in Paris. They decided to do something a little different with their lives, and started to connect the owners of Sicilian treasures, like Marina and Andrea, with holidaymakers like Vince. Huw's understanding of the European and US markets and Rossella's Sicilian know-how have proved a formidable combination. When they started they had the field almost to themselves; now, with increasing competition, they move ever upmarket. The best guides, the best hotels, the best villas, helicopters, palaces: there does not seem to be anything they cannot conjure.

L'Olmo was one of Huw and Rossella's first discoveries, and remains one of their favourites. Before the lemon groves, the villa was surrounded by vineyards; the huge ground-floor rooms are domed chapels for keeping casks cool. Stone steps take you up to the bedrooms. Most have balconies, some have external staircases, all have views of the sea or the volcano. Marina and Andrea have effortless good taste: the rooms are decorated in a style which understands that space and the fall of light and shadow are as important as furnishing. To sit under the trees on the terrace, contemplating another of the cook Valeria's exquisite meals, surrounded by your family and friends, is to be utterly disarmed, and happy.

L'Olmo is available through Think Sicily (020 7377 8518; www.thinksicily.com), from €16,000 a week for the whole villa. Marina and Andrea's own house, also available to rent, is hidden at the end of the garden, and they are on hand to help if you need them for anything, and invisible if you don't

Pictured: hostess Marina di San Giuliano and her husband at villa L'Olmo, Sicily

She is a tall blonde with startling blue eyes, wearing a crimson silk trouser-suit. There are diamonds in the lobes of her ears, an opal on her left hand, an emerald on her right. In some places this might seem a little lavish for quarter past three in the afternoon, but not here, at the top of the staircase which sweeps you up to her front door. At her Palermo home, the Palazzo Gangi, the Princess Carine Vanni Mantegna is receiving.

The house has been in her husband's family since 1652. The Barons Valguarnera arrived in Sicily from Spain in the early 13th century, shortly before the Aragonese and long before the Bourbons who appointed them viceroys and conferred the title 'prince' upon them. They controlled vast tuna concessions, were licenced to print money and by the 18th century were masters of 10,000 vassals. They overhauled the house then, employing Sicily's master craftsmen. Two hundred years later, in the mid 1960s, it fell into some dilapidation. But for almost four centuries not one guest has entered here without a speechless sense of wonder.

For the Palazzo Gangi is a treasure chest, an unplundered temple to art, antiquity and marvel. This is how the cream of Europe's aristocracy aspired to live, and how in a few, a very few places, live still. 'There are perhaps 12 family houses like this left in the world,' says the Princess. This is Versailles on a domestic scale. Which still means four 'halls': high-ceilinged, lovely rooms which would each comfortably swallow two Palermo flats, where the eye falls on paintings, sculpture, glassware and furniture that would have representatives of the world's greatest museums and galleries waving blank cheques in an unseemly way. The white-and-gold dining room is Louis XIV in style, Sicilian in manufacture. Everywhere the baroque and neoclassical traditions fall into one another's arms like lovers, with Liberty style and Empire joining the dance.

Try not to gasp as the princess leads you on. There is a Pietro Novelli self-portrait, there is an exquisite ebonised cabinet, beautifully decorated, whose twin recently moved the Christie's catalogue writers to stuttering hyperbole. There is an Indo-Portuguese cabinet, inlaid with ivory, and a set of Murano glasses you could stare at for a day. There is a bust thought to be by Canova. There is silver, there is silk, there is the ballroom with the painted floor where Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale danced for Visconti's film of The Leopard.On the piano are photographs of a few previous guests, all European royalty. The Queen Mother is not the only one looking slightly dazed.

The Palazzo Gangi is unquestionably a world heritage site, but it is an unofficial, undesignated one. The princess receives no help with the huge task of restoration and maintenance because the family are not prepared to surrender it to an outside body. Instead it is her life's work. She employs two restorers, installed in a fully equipped workshop, who met and married here: one suspects they will labour all their days on its preservation. The American bombs missed it, earthquakes have not harmed it, and the princess is steel-sharp in her determination that modern bureaucracy will not damage it either. Houses, they say, sometimes choose their owners. The Palazzo Gangi has made no mistake. The princess sometimes receives guests, at dinners or for private tours (donations are the house's principal source of income). She prefers to be contacted through ThinkSicily (020 7377 8518; www.thinksicily.com)

After Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals and Byzantines, came the Saraceni, the Arabs, the great gardeners of Sicily. They brought irrigation and cultivation: their gifts ran from silk and citrus fruits to sanitation and better fishing methods. Sicily became a jigsaw of Emirates. Then, in 1064, came adventurers from the north, Norman mercenaries who had struck a deal with the Pope. If you can break the Muslim hold on that strange, off-shore other world, you can have it, ran the terms. With their long lances and heavy armour the Normans conquered, but did not scourge. Instead they ruled a tolerant society, where Arab civilisation, learning and craftsmanship were prized. And so Sicily became something else, a kingdom of God where Allah was also worshipped, the world's first harmony of East and West (and a vexation to successive popes). You can still feel it in Palermo's old centre. In the extraordinary Norman-Arab architecture, you can still see it.

We should be well prepared, starting the day in Pasticceria Alba, or any one of Palermo's 1950s cafés, with a fresh orange juice (we are on the clasp of the orange belt stretching from Seville to Damascus), acornetto alla crema, a lemon-custard croissant (because we are on holiday), and a coffee (only in Ethiopia can you get better coffee). Charged with sugar, caffeine and anticipation, we go up Corso Vittorio Emanuele, which begins at the sea, past the cathedral, a great stone ship designed by Normans, trimmed and decorated by Arabs, to the Norman Palace. We marvel at the Palatina Chapel, commissioned by Roger II, greatest of the Norman rulers, whose nameless masters of wood, stone and decoration made him a chapel like a little jewellery box, fit for God.

Next we take a bus to Monreale, 15km south of Palermo. Monreale is the crown of the Conca d'Oro, the Golden Shell, the great sweep of bay from Monte Pellegrino to the mountains that cradles Palermo and is only matched in beauty by the Bay of Naples. The cathedral of Monreale was constructed by William the Good, a Norman king who fell headlong into the temptations of the East (his lifestyle would have embarrassed a sultan) but not before he had put Arab artists, Byzantine mosaicists and Norman architects to work creating one of the wonders of the world.

The interior of the cathedral is the Sistine Chapel of medieval Europe. It is a golden vision, a dream of the testaments, Old and New. The mosaics tell their stories in a downpour of colour, life and drama. It is as close as the visual arts can come to the power of music. We stand as the first worshippers would have stood, when the doors were opened, and townsfolk, court, craftsmen and king gazed up at what they had done. They must have known it at once: here is a splinter of eternity. Here is man's tribute to the Kingdom, the Power Glory. The Sicilians have a typically pithy attitude to their treasure. Who visits Sicily without seeing Monreale arrives a donkey and leaves a beast, they say.

This is how the world was born and how the earth was made. Nine thousand feet up, it is still happening. We walk through thick curtains of sulphur fumes. 'Stay very close to me,' says Andrea, the guide. We tiptoe along the edge of the smoking mouth of the central crater as if trying not to wake her. Etna, la mutagna, the mountain, is always referred to as 'she'. We have scarves over our mouths and go very slowly, sometimes blindly, through reeking gas. 'No one knows what's down there,' Andrea says. He rolls a rock in and we hear it bounding down, down to a rattling roar, then a boom, then silence. The steamy smoke closes in again. We step around a burst bubble in the ground and pass huge cakes of sulphur, like loaves of golden sugar. It smells like the devil's bedroom. Etna whistles and hisses as if it is not the giant Enceladus trapped down there, as the Greeks believed, but a nest of burning snakes. Scalding gas jets from yellow holes around our feet.

There is a loud boom from the northeast crater. Andrea freezes and my heart pounds. We are tiny intruders here, weak as the insects carried up by Etna's eight winds to die in her snowfields and volcanic deserts. I look at Andrea. He has explained what to do if something happens. We will fight the urge to run: we will stop, look and use our heads. Then run. There are more explosions. 'Fireworks,' he says. We are not disappointed: there are black splats around our feet, the bursts of lava bombs, missiles the size of washing machines hurled hundreds of metres from another crater. Further down the mountain, Andrea saw a man struck by a smoking rock thrown lazily out of a side vent.

Andrea is the perfect guide, and not just because no one has ever been hurt on his watch. Arriving at the top, after a steep trudge through snow, is an overwhelming emotional experience. Etna makes people cry, sometimes: climbing her is a life-marking moment, one you want to undergo with someone who understands your sense of Etna's terrible sublime, who adores and studies her. Andrea's head is full of volcanology, stories and dates. When she did this, when she did that. She obeys only her own rhythms and Andrea is her devoted student. He gives an unforgettable lecture, illustrated with handfuls of black ash, on how she has grown and changed from one summit crater to four, on her quakes and collapses, on different eruptions, lavas and pyroclastic flows in her repertoire. He is proud of her, like a man who has befriended a dragon.

Etna seems to resent man's works. On the way up you pass the wrecks of three cable-car systems. Andrea points out the positions of refuges, roads and restaurants, all gone. You can see the very top of a two-storey hotel buried in still-steaming ash. Anything which comes too close is obliterated. You thank her for having you, as you descend, and for letting you go. Nothing, not even the sea in its full fury, is quite as extraordinary as Etna. Andrea Ercolani takes tours up Etna and the Madonies (00 39 095 968 882). He provides boots, jackets and water, drives you from your hotel to the cable car, then a Unimog takes you to within 90 minutes' walk of the top. Etna is monitored by seismological instruments which, in theory, warn of imminent activity.

Pictured: belching craters at the summitof Etna, viewed from a helicopter

We track up Etna like a windborne beetle, over lower slopes dotted with houses and orchards, then up through the midway air, over thick vegetation, to the Valle del Bove, the giant bowl which has caught the flow of some of her greatest eruptions. The lava here is vast, a petrified Victoria Falls of rock. There are gasps as passengers crane to take it in. Up we go, over a monochrome sea, white snow and black lava, up towards the summit. The wind is 40 knots and rising. Clouds come like great breakers and while all of eastern Sicily lies beneath us, Etna is still climbing. You can feel the pilot's concentration. He watches the rock which fills the port side windows and the rolling clouds. Lorenzo is a man whose ringtone is a helicopter engine beginning to scream: it takes a lot to make him tense. Suddenly, there are the four craters, black as death with yellow sulphur teeth, grey and white gases pouring out of them. We float next to them, swaying in the rushing air. We are lightheaded and speechless, gleeful and scared, gaping at the open-mouthed mountain, a monster in a sea cloud.

We turn away from Etna with the relief of swimmers who have tweaked the Kraken's tail. We ride down cloud above the Madonie mountains, higher than their peaks and points, lower than an aeroplane. Everything is visible, almost palpable: towns, tracks and fields, roads and passes, hills and huts, coiling mountain paths and dry, splayed river beds laid out below us; it is a sun-washed, God's-eye view of a Sicilian afternoon. We cross the coast and head for the Aeolians, islands like a pod of whales surfacing in the Tyrrhenian Sea, hazy at first, then clear. We strafe Lipari, hurtling straight at it as Lorenzo squares his shoulders like a man set on flooring his opponent. Deep breath. We shoot over the shore, jump a hill, slalom between rock stacks and cliffs. We surprise sunbathers on boats, disdain yachts and perform something like a cartwheel over the crater of Vulcano. The smell of sulphur fills the cabin.

At Salina we dodge a seagull before sneaking up on the hotel at Capo Faro, popping up suddenly over the cliff. Everyone around the swimming pool sits up: I make a mental note of the sunlounger I will occupy in a few minutes' time. There is a puff of smoke across the water: the volcano of Stromboli firing a salute. It may not be green or gracious, but there is no cooler way to arrive at a classy hotel, and the Capofaro Malvasia & Resort is classy indeed. It takes a while for the adrenalin to subside, and to realise that you have arrived in a most tranquil and beautiful place, on the tranquil and beautiful little island of Salina.

Sicily will give you the time of your life, but you need to concentrate sometimes, and respect her ways. She is not a playground. But the Aeolians, where you feel closer to the sea than anywhere in it, just might be. Time, which is stacked everywhere in Sicily, antique, classical and recent like piles of broken tiles, is irrelevant on Salina. You walk more slowly, stare longer at little things. There are two sea urchins on the harbour wall. There is a blue moped against a green door. There is Da Alfredo where, it is said, they make the best granita in the world. People who know their food, Sicilians groan luxuriously at the thought of perfectly combined crushed ice and lemon juice. A local explains that something in citrus increases the capacity of red blood cells to absorb oxygen: there is no sweeter solution to the Sicilian summer than a lemon granita.

Air Panarea has helicopter tours from Catania or Taormina (or elsewhere by arrangement), taking in Etna and Stromboli, from €720 for up to six people (00 39 340 366 7214; www.airpanarea.com). Capofaro Malvasia & Resort (00 39 090 98 44 330; www.capofaro.it). Doubles from €200